About

I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am also a non-traditional student and a mother of three, ages 17-24 years. My passions for radical feminism and feminist scholarship are informed by my experiences of girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood in the United States.

My perspective on life and scholarship are influenced by growing up in a poverty-class family on the fringes of society, by how I've been shaped by barriers of economic precarity and struggle, and by the barriers (and joys!) of mothering as a young woman. I began my intellectual work as a community college student and I am committed to centering the importance of class analysis and the worth of a perspective from the economic margins.

My research examines how embodied social class and economic status, sex and sex roles/stereotypes, race and ethnicity, ability and more, shape experiences of women's health, childbearing, and mothering. My passion is to advocate for reproductive justice, and resist reproductive oppression in the many forms it takes.

My research and scholarship are currently focused on resisting the discursive erasure of women and girls, particularly in health and gender discourse; attempts to disassociate the female body from womanhood; the mistaken idea that biological sex is socially constructed or possible to change, the loss of women and girls' civil rights through changes to laws that remove sex protections and define gender as a feeling; and the abusive and dangerously experimental practices of medically "transing" children and young adults.